Anjali Gupta is an independent critic, editor and video producer based in San Antonio. She is Editor of ARTL!ES, a contemporary art quarterly published in Texas. Her writing has appeared in catalogues and numerous periodicals including tema celeste, Art Papers, Art Asia Pacific and artUS.
During Joseph Beuys’ lengthy performance I Like America And America Likes Me, (1974), the artist's four-legged companion takes an unceremonious crap atop a stack of the Wall Street Journal newspapers. While this gesture does elicit an audible response from the artist, it makes me howl with abandon. Just think about it: picture Beuys in shaman drag, penned up in a New York gallery with a feral coyote for days, attempting to rectify both past and present historical injustices through the coerced matrimony of sincerity and absurdity. The esoteric artifice, the quixotic parody of his piece—the very valence of what the artist considered a potentially redemptive act—is obliterated in one decisive moment by, of all things, inadvertent potty training.
If nothing else, I Like America And America Likes Me demonstrates that bodily fluids can be an appropriate means of debunking cultural detritus. Saul Alvarez intuits this, mining the intellectual slippage inherent in Beuys’ piece in order to exploit the communicative potential of a variety of media. Take his series of photographs, primary ventures in house breaking or pissing my pants while wearing a coyote pelt. While Alvarez’ art-historical shorthand is unmistakable, this artist does not require a middleman—in this case a live animal—to make his point. He exploits the shortcomings (and humiliations) of his chronological predecessor not to become part of a conceptual corollary, but as a demonstration of a sort of phantom limb syndrome—an ideological prosthetic that never quite fit—or never worked quite as well as anticipated.
